What is an open house?

Why do real estate agents offer open house opportunities to potential buyers?

An open house is simply a scheduled period of time where a house or residential property is “open” or available for potential buyers to view and walk through at their leisure.

Open houses can attract interested buyers and even lead to an offer or offers, they can also help the real estate agent to understand potential property issues or concerns.

For sellers, an open house provides an opportunity for more potential buyers to view and walk through the property. Even if the open house does not lead directly to an offer it can also provide essential insight into what buyers like and dislike about the property. (Some things potential buyers might point out are relative easy fixes and can help sell the property quicker – paint colors for instance.)

Some PROS of open houses:

Attracts interested buyers
Alerts agents and homeowners to issues that can potentially be corrected easily
Some buyers are more likely to walk through an open house than to actually schedule a showing with their agent

Some CONS of open houses:

Requires effort from the agent and the homeowner to prepare and organize the open house
Online listings with multiple photos are comparable to an open house, buyers can see most – if not all – of the home’s features and amenities in photos

Benefits of touring open houses

Even though a potential buyer can view almost every room, feature and amenity of a property through online photos, nothing will ever be able to compare with actually walking through a home to get the feeling it provides.

Walking through and visiting open houses can be an incredible learning experience. First, going through open houses will definitely help you discover what you like and – more importantly – don’t like about the homes. You can start to get a better picture of exactly what your dream home entails.

You will also gain a much better understanding of the pricing of homes and how the features, neighborhoods and amenities directly impact the asking price.

So whether you are actively looking to purchase, thinking of selling, or just trying to gather information and ideas before you decide exactly which direction you want to go, take a look at the local Greenville area open houses listed here.